Forums General Discussion Is IRC dying??

Hi,

Everyone tells me on IRC that "IRC" is dying off as in the trend so to speak.

I want to know how far true this is... Is there any statistics that can prove or disprove this notion?

I would love to know what the answers to this would be

Sidney

I can't provide stats, but IRC is not dying off. It's used differently than IM, so you cannot compare the two like so many people who say it's dying off try doing.

EDIT: Correction... I do have stats for you right here. As you can see, there are a lot of people using IRC.

This topic has been done to death a few times, and "is IRC dying" must have been asked a million times since I have been using IRC, (before mIRC came out). Trends change more often than people change their underwear, IM's are fine for 1 to 1 or to drop a line to a friend. But you can't really compare IRC and IM.

It's true a lot of people still use IRC, but not in comparison to a couple of years ago.

Quakenet's max user count in the last 2 years is 143,863 users. At the moment they're averaging 80,000. That's a loss of 60,000 in two years.

The story is similar for other IRC networks.

I tried to think up, why is this happening, besides the fact that IRC is old news.

If solutions could be found to regain what IRC once was, what would be those solutions.

I think IRC needs more demanding users... and people to listen to users requests for these features. If users dont demand updated features and better environments then no progress would be made as it happened with IRC.

IRC still exists and it's not dying in that sense but it is loosing users.

one big reason I see for this is because people are moving away from multi-user chat systems (like IRC) to community websites (like facebook, twitter).

Why do people keep repeatedly re-starting this old discussion without doing any research whatsoever?



The story is similar for other networks, but you left out half of the story:



QuakeNet may have lost 60,000 people in 2 years, but it also gained 100k+ users in 2 years a few years earlier. Note that this was around the time that MySpace was hugely popular and Facebook was becoming so.

The story is that IRC is not dying, it's merely stabilizing. The growths of 200%+/yr you would have seen in the 2002-2004 years was not sustainable by any means. You see this same growth among most networks in that time period. No wonder these networks are getting smaller; they're stabilizing.

I'm sure there was a more interesting reason behind the increase in users at that specific time (counterstrike? p2p? who knows) but saying "IRC is dying" because you compare it to what it was 4 years ago is short-sighted and inaccurate. A more accurate comparison would be to IRC's user count before the 2002 "blip". Such an analysis would conclude that most networks are actually larger than they were a decade ago, some by more than 2-5x.

It's also important to note that while some networks decline, other new networks grow. So you still need to look at the complete picture of IRC. The network UStream.tv has grown to ~40k users in the last year alone. That certainly accounts for much of the loss of QuakeNet users. I'm sure we can find other pockets of migration for other users as well. Networks like Rizon have actually grown quite consistently over the last year, which shows promise. And of course, one of the biggest success stories, freenode which has been growing extremely consistently over the last decade. It may not be the size of QuakeNet, but it's still a very healthy display of growth.



QuakeNet sprung up just a little over a decade ago and is now the largest IRC network. One of the smaller networks right now could just be the next #1, so QuakeNet's decline (even if it's not just a stabilization) is not proof of any large scale decline of IRC.

Like i said, "Ive been told by other people on IRC"

And i just wanted an educated perception on the truth <Research>

But many thanks for your input.

Sid

IRC it's not dead, but it's definitely not what it used to be around 2000-2003. The mainstream chatters have gone to IM and of course social networking sites. Of course there are still the "
"enthusiasts", who can be found on servers like freenode.

So, whereas around 1999-2003 it was used for mainstream chatting, now I think it's more used as a support platform, for projects, communites, just like forums, which are also popular.

Or am I completely off here?


A related discussion, what about the mIRC scripting scene?
Are there still any active sites, besides good old Hawkee?

mircscripts.com

Seems very dead to me!

I think he meant .org

http://mircscripts.org

Well, .org is also not exactly thriving as it used to be

That's true about many scripting sites. That said, I still see updates a few times a week on that site, which isn't too bad.

Also mirc.net, while not as busy as it has been, still gets submissions which are virus checked, tested, and reviewed.

Script updates a few times a week, but no site news in almost a year and no new script submissions since March 8th.

Seems to me like a combination of the hugely popular social networking websites taking users from IRC, and the old hardcore scripters moving onto other languages has caused this drop in activity.

I'm sure it's low on Khaled's todo list, but I think a version with major scripting enhancements might attract new interest. By that I mean > extended dialogs, COM events, for/switch constructs, the ability to use the WINAPI, etc.

I really do not understand why people become so emotional when this subject is raised. It's not like the comments are personal or vindictive.

It has to be said that whilst IRC is not dying, it is certainly not as popular as it once was. There are several clear reasons for this.

1. Instant messengers: There's at least four popular messenger services, certainly four that I am aware of. These have more features that new Internet users may find useful. Hardened long-term IRC users like me don't like messengers and my reasoning has always been why have more than one text-based real time chat programme? To me it doesn't make sense but to others it's all good.

2. Social networking: There's not only Twitter and Facebook. There's dozens of popular social networking sites. Some have live chat and others don't but again, new Internet users will find these sites appealing, especially the younger crowd that don't like being lectured by opers on an IRC network. Most of these places allow users to control things like spam and abuse themselves and this alone would make them more popular even before opening a discussion on the many extra features available.

3. IRC is old and very reliable, probably more reliable than any other Internet communications protocol and this reliability comes about due to simplicity. There's bugger-all features by comparison to newer technologies but to a lot of people that is a good thing. IRC is a real time chat protocol, nothing more, nothing less and that is the way it should stay, popular or not.

4. Bad experiences on IRC have driven people away. Many (certainly not all) networks have been hamstrung by poor customer relations, foul-tempered/corrupt opers, allowing politics and bitterness get in the way of what really matters.

5. IRC networks don't make money for their owners, try as many have. Running an IRC server never generates a return on investment. There is no practical way of generating income from running IRC despite any good network running IRC on professional equipment costing thousands of dollars.

IRC does have a loyal stronghold, no doubt about that. Included in that group is myself. Do I believe that IRC's popularity is waning? Yes I do. Instead of looking at the statistics of one network as some have done in this thread, wouldn't it be more accurate to look at the whole picture over the last, say, ten years? Quakenet's staggering but short-term popularity grew out of the failure of Dalnet to drop a lid on the morons flooding their network. I'm not suggesting this is the only reason but that event did have significance. Let's face it - the combined population of the top 100 networks in the last ten years has fallen dramatically.

I don't think IRC will die, certainly not in the foreseeable future however it is not as popular as it once was and that popularity is unlikely to return.